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Business School Professor Darryl Seale Receives NSF Grant

Posted: August 7, 2014

Lee School of Business professor Darryl Seale and colleagues from Cambridge University and UC-Riverside have received a $160,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study cost-sharing allocation in transportation network scenarios, where commuters have to independently choose one of several modes of private or public transportation (e.g., driving one’s own car, joining a carpool, riding a shuttle) and then share the commonly known cost of transportation with the other users.

The project, titled "Cost-sharing Allocation in Directed Networks," examines these situations, which are quite common in transportation and communication networks. They typically involve central authorities who have to decide which modes of public transportation or alternative modes of communication should be offered to the general public. A major focus of the research is the construction and testing of adaptive learning models to account for decisions that evolve over time. The proposal outlines six computer-controlled experiments that systematically manipulate features of the network, protocols of play (e.g., simultaneous vs. sequential choice), information structure, and degrees of centralization of the users, and choices.